


Atom Accelerator

by backintimeforstuff



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s05e11 The Lodger, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 15:40:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19406311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backintimeforstuff/pseuds/backintimeforstuff
Summary: "There's always the fifth moon of Sinda Callista?"The Doctor teaches Amy how to fly the TARDIS.A prequel to The Lodger.





	Atom Accelerator

For mid-morning, the control room was quiet. 

There was no questionable screeching of gears, no wheezing of the brakes, the console only hummed quietly in the presence of the Doctor as he mused.

He’s prepared to take a day off today. 

Not just from the monsters, that’s a given, but… from everything. Absolutely, everything. 

They could just sit around. He expects Amy will want to. She hasn’t even talked about it, Vincent and the sunflowers; not properly, not yet. That is if she ever does. Some of the things he’s seen have been locked away for centuries – time alone will tell when she’ll want to move on. 

A part of him feels a bit glad, for want of a better word, because at least this time he can understand what she’s going through. 

She’s usually such a mystery to him, and even with his seemingly limitless experience of the human race, Amy is something else. She’s the girl with all the fire, and he hates that he can’t always help her.

The other part of him feels awful. 

He’s never really considered it before; how hard history could hit. The overwhelming feeling of grainy monochrome photographs coming to colourful life, faceless figures, statistics, becoming living people, with their own stories, their own families. Over the last few weeks, catastrophes forgotten on the pages of history books had been reality to Amelia Pond, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine how it must have caught her. 

He’d been so engrossed in this train of thought, staring without properly seeing at the console that he didn’t immediately notice her. She’d appeared silently at the top of the staircase, and only when the heel of one of her boots made contact with the step, did he snap up to stare. 

“Amelia!” 

He didn’t intend to sound so surprised, but her name had slipped out of his mouth before he could even try to mask it. She looked…fine, genuinely fine. Her hand rested lightly upon the railing as she came down towards him, a sense of adventure radiating from her like it always seemed to, and in the midst of everything it was like the last few days had never happened. 

That surprised him more than anything. Not that he wanted another day of tears and sunflowers, but… Amelia. 

God, one day he’d understand her. She’d let him in past all of her mad, complexities, and then, everything would become so simple. 

Although, he doubted it. 

He realised too late he was staring at her with his mouth open, because she raised her eyebrow at him. Her hand came to rest on the crook of his elbow. 

“I’m fine. stop worrying.” 

“Sure?” 

It was the Doctor’s turn to place a hand on her arm, his eyes narrowing.

“I’m not rushing you, we could-”

“-We could take a day off from scary monsters?” 

Amy’s question caught him off guard and he resumed staring at her, stumped.

“…Well, yeah.” 

One day, one bloody day, she’d make sense to him. 

“Well, we have to do something, you weren’t planning to keep me locked up in here like some kind of patient, were you?” 

She threw this question out in a vaguely accusing manner and walked past him as he said nothing. 

In reality, Amy wanted nothing more than to tell him how great he’d been, telling her tales of good things and bad things, but, it was history. It was beyond real, but it had to be moved on from - accepted for what it was. The man with a time machine had said so himself: you morn, but you live.

If there were other planets in the sky that needed exploring, sunflowers could be left on the back-burner. 

Just as long as they could go somewhere relaxing. Or as monster-free as the Doctor could manage. 

“There’s always the fifth moon of Sinda Callista?” 

It was a question he didn’t expect an answer to. Amy had encountered many of these throughout her time with The Doctor. He usually relied on her benign curiosity alone to launch into an excited anecdote about the universe – telling her everything about specific planets, crimson sounds, and silent stars. 

Sometimes he’d gaze at her in midst of pure happiness and tell her about empires of pure thought, where the sea was asleep and rivers dreamed. Somewhere of course, there was danger, injustice, but in as much as the universe was terrible, it was also wonderful. It was a whole universe of impossibilities. 

He was yet to get his head around it. 

He supposed it was very much like her. 

In a spur of the moment, while The Doctor was comparing the entire universe to Amelia Pond, he decided to give it to her. 

He’d given her the stars before, on the night he’d given her a Tardis key, but, teaching her to fly, to helm the controls of his time machine, was something else he could do. 

Anywhere and everywhere, he’d said.

This would give her freedom over it all. It was the only thing he could think of doing. 

Amy’s eyes were wide when he told her. He gestured to the console with a small smile, dials and switches humming slightly as she stepped up to them, hovering a hand. 

Seconds seemed to last forever; it was so unlike her to be caught in indecision, that The Doctor let out a quiet laugh. He stepped up to guide her, leading her over to a dark metallic lever before placing her hand upon it. 

“First thing’s first: this.” 

He waited patiently for her to comply, but when Amy still did nothing; when her breath of anticipation met his ears, he grinned. 

“It won’t hurt you. Promise. Just pull it up.” 

Eventually she did – in a quick, scared movement she thrust it upwards and immediately flinched back into him when it fell back down into resting position with a loud clang. 

“It does that, it’s alright.” 

“What does it do, Doctor?”

The concern in Amy’s voice was very real, as if hoping beyond everything that this wasn’t a vital lever, one which might cause an explosion of great magnitude if accidentally misused. 

“What, this?” 

The Doctor motioned to said lever with an air of humour. He pulled it up again himself, letting it crash back down as Amy had done. 

“It just locks the doors.” 

He thwacked the lever up for the third time with a sense of finality, and grinned at Amy’s scowl before she whacked him on the arm. 

Gesturing for her to follow him around to another panel directly opposite the doors, Amy narrowed her eyes at the sight of a small metal ball set into the glass of the console, spinning back and forth. She’d always seen the Doctor fiddle with this in flight, so she hovered her hand above it carefully, trailing her eyes down to a number of switches lower on the outer rim of the console. 

The keyboard beckoned to her. 

Anywhere you want, any time you want. 

A steering wheel for the whole universe. 

“Amy Pond, meet the atom accelerator.” 

Her breath caught in her throat as he whispered those words. She was past indecision now, past even anticipation, her head was in the clouds and it already felt like she was flying. Quietly, she asked:

“What was it you said? The fifth moon of where?” 

“Sinda Callista.” 

The Doctor’s eyes were bright. 

“One of the best hotspots, ever. The planet itself is pretty colourful, but the fifth moon... well…” He broke off and waved his hand at the keyboard. “Type it in if you want to see it. The entire sky is pink.” 

He watched her with a slight smile as she did so, the atom accelerator twirling to Amy’s desires. The Doctor leaned over and twisted a few copper taps, dinging a small bell for good measure. He wasn’t entirely sure what it did, but it always seemed to make the process more exciting. 

“You know what comes next.” 

“Do I?”

He recalled a conversation of theirs from his memory. 

“First the queen, now the prime minster? I suppose I get around.” 

It took Amy a second, but she got there. She’d helped him with it before, after saving the Star Whale, and together they moved around to the right, finding themselves standing aside a panel with a red lever; identical to another across the console. The Doctor wafted his hands in explanation.

“This one is the damper. Absorbs all the shocks like a…”

“Shock absorber?” Amy was quick to reply. 

“Yeah.” The Doctor winced slightly. “Kind of like the ones you get in cars but infinitely more trans-dimensional. Takes a lot of strain out of the landings - they’d be hectic without it.”

“Oh, cause they’re usually so calm?” 

Amy muttered this quietly under her breath as she pulled it down, and the Doctor pretended not to notice.

“Next is the other red lever over there” - he said, waving a hand at it – “which is equally as important. If not more so.” 

Standing with their backs to the doors now, he looked at it with the excitement of a small child in a sweet shop. 

“Any guesses?” 

“What, after steering wheels and shock absorbers?” Amy thought for a second, eyeing the lever. “You’d need an ignition, wouldn’t you, like a… start button?” 

“Absolutely.” The Doctor whacked it upwards. “It’s the materialisation lever. Really quite vital.” 

He came to the end of his demonstration in a flourish, nodding over to the last step of dematerialisation. 

Amy followed his gaze and went to inspect the large jewelled lever a little way off, the one that seemed to pulse with pale green energy from within its silver casing.

“What this?”

“The handbrake.” 

For a few moments after that, everything was a blur. The second Amy had reached out and pulled, the entire room came to life. 

The wheezing and groaning sound she had come to know so well seemed to swell from nowhere, the metal structure shuddering in protest. The roar of the engines made the room spin, lights appearing on the console, flashing brightly, bouncing off the copper walls. 

The transparent glass floor vanished from beneath her feet, and it felt like she could be standing on a cloud.

In all of the chaos, the only solid thing in the room was the Doctor, and she grabbed onto his wrist as the TARDIS took off into the depths of space, taking them far beyond the distant stars. 

As soon as everything had started, it stopped. 

The engines engulfed into silence with a defining thump, the ship becoming still. 

Without a second thought, the Doctor leapt down the stairs towards the door and pulled it open.

He stuck his head out with interest. For Amy’s first flight, he was intrigued to see where they had ended up. 

He looked upon an Earth-like scene: a perfectly ordinary 21st century street with houses and a park. 

He heard her call from the console. 

“Right place?” 

The Doctor sighed. 

“No Amy, it’s definitely not the fifth moon of Sinda Callista.” 

He narrowed his eyes. 

“I think I can see a Rymans.”


End file.
